THERE MAY BE ONLY a thousand or so holders of the surname DUNSIREin
the world today, many of them still living in Scotland, and
particularly in Fife, though there are now large extended families in
Canada and USA, and in Western Australia. With this site
you can explore your own Dunsire ancestry, and contribute your own
family tree if it is not here, or bring it up to date if it is.

As is conventional, an UNDERLINED title is a jump-straight-there HYPERLINK.Origins and Beginningstakes
you to a general survey of the origins of the surname, and profiles of
some of the earliest known Dunsires, of the 15th and 16th centuries..Dunsire Descents 1590-1920is a chart of the known families, by their numbers, showing the lines that died out; followed by Indexes of Names and of Family Numbers. The distribution of Early Dunsire Families
in Scotland in the earliest parish regis-ters, in the 17th and 18th
centuries, is set out decade by decade and parish by parish.The Progenitorsdescribes the main claim of a book published in 1997 about the Dunsire Families of Fife (from which a great deal of the genealogical information used here is taken) - namely, that all
the Dunsires living today are descended from two sons of a single
family in the parish of Wemyss, Fife, in the mid-eighteenth century.The Progenitors also, however, notes that this is not true!
Since the book was published, a complete non-Fife line has been
identified, stemming from a Lanark man, John Dunsyre, and his wife
Janet Sinclair (see The Janet Sinclair Line).
Then the site traces the male lines of each of the three
progenitors, in turn the Janet Sinclair line and that of the two Wemyss
sons (also named from their wives, Agnes Nicoland Christian Buchan), from that time until this - so far as the writer's information goes, and subject to privacy conditions. The site continues with pages on Dunsires in USA, Dunsires in Canada,and Dunsiresin Australia; and ends with some brief biographies of Eminent Dunsires and Last Words & Links.

NB There is some important information on how to read the site on the NEXT PAGE.